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19 Comments

I wish they had fixed the Itunes Match issues where in the play count and last palyed dates keeps reverting back to a couple of days sometimes months old. Its a nightmare to manage your Smart Playlists because of this Bug. I am using iTunes without Match enabled for the last couple of months now, which is ridiculous considering that I paid for it and cannot use it / am not using it.

Somebody could make a lot of money with a great alternative to iTunes. It’s just a mess, now. Instead of intuitive controls, you now have to figure out the little secrets to get things done. And then you have to remember them.

I’m getting the feeling Tim Cook doesn’t use his own products enough to recognize how badly some of them operate. I suspect Steve Jobs would have screamed at the mess off spaghetti that’s iTunes and iCloud, and sometimes Mail.

Tim Cook by his own admission does 80% of his work on an iPad. In addition, I remember reading that he felt unable to properly test products like Steve Jobs did. Therefore, he relied on the lead developers to test their own products. This is like asking authors to be their own proof reader and editor.

Songbird was supposed to be the iTunes alternative. But it’s been generally mediocre and is now stagnating. Aspects of it have also be a huge PITA, like being able to even download and install it without throwing errors. (o_O)

Dangit, they still haven’t fixed the issue of album art not showing up in new genius playlists. Pre-iTunes 12 genius playlists still show them, but new ones created in iTunes 12 don’t, and there’s no option to show them.

I use iTunes pretty much solely for the purpose of managing the music on my iPod classic via smart playlists. It pretty much does it all automatically whenever I dock my iPod. If I want to listen to music, I generally use the iPod.

Well, it took 5 years for Apple to update iWork apps, and it was clear that the 2014 apps were gutted of desktop functionality primarily in order to force people to use iCloud. After all, that’s what Google and Microsoft are doing. The faster these companies force people to use their servers for document storage, the sooner these companies can charge monthly fees for you to store your data.

So too it is with iTunes. The reason iTunes has degraded in usability and stability in the last several years is because Apple is in the process of forcing subscription services for media too. Even though millions of people already have extensive music & video collections of our own, Apple wants us to rent our media. To speed the process, Apple is making iTunes progressively uglier and harder to use, while making zero effort at improving file management and sync capabilities. One can’t see what “other” files are clogging up your phone. Syncs fail regularly. Podcast management is a mess. archiving large libraries results in more spinning beach balls than any other application i’ve ever seen.

It is true: Apple’s software quality is declining badly because Apple is more interested in selling iCloud than they are serving longtime customers who know what they want, which is intuitive software that just works. No longer can that be said about Apple software. I’ve said this for a few years now, and it seems finally even the MDN echo chamber is starting to realize that Apple leadership is turning a technology company into a fashion business that doesn’t attend to the details. This is unacceptable to some of us. Apple more than ever needs to get a software chief engineer to right the ship, and get Jony the hell out of there. iTunes 12 is a @#$%$&^% ugly mess.